10 New macOS Tahoe Features You May Have Missed

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are some things you may have missed when you watched or read about the announcement of macOS Tahoe. 

macOS Tahoe is macOS 26. Now that we're using the year as the version number which will make it easier to match versions of operating systems so you know which ones came out at the same time. Of course a lot of talk now centers around the new look for macOS. The new glass look to everything. But there are a lot of actual features and functions that are new as well. 

Let me start off by showing you themes. That right! You can have theme macOS. It's a couple simple settings inside of System Settings and you want to go to Appearance. You notice here the accent colors, now just called Color, and Highlight Color called Text highlight color. These work in the same way that they did before. But underneath that, and grouped together in this Theme Section, you've got Icon & Widget Style. So default if just what we've always had. All of the App Icons and different icons here inside bars, like this, show up just as you would expect with their own colors. In addition to that we've got a Folder Color setting here. If we have it on Automatic the folder colors are the blue we always remember from before. But if we switch to something else, like red here, then folder colors will change to match that. This is the default folder color and you can choose from all these colors here or Other to choose any color you want. 

Now we can switch the Icon & Widget Style from default to Dark. Now we're going to get this dark look. So it's be a black background f or icons and you see here for these icons here in the System Setting sidebar. You can set it to Always or Automatic. In other words stick with the default during the day and go to Dark at night. You also have Clear and Clear has a Light setting, like this, or a Dark setting, like this, or you can have it set to Auto for night and day. Clear just picks up the background color behind things. So in other words makes it even more transparent. We also have Tinted. So with Tinted it uses this color here. You can see it changes from Folder color to now Icon & Widget and Folder color. Now I can tint all of these icons a different color and the folders as well. You can choose all of these different colors or Other as the color you want for tinting. You can set it to Dark Tint, like this, or Automatic.

Now let's talk about the Menu Bar. The Menu Bar is now transparent. I think it looks really cool this way and it is a change that has been long overdue. But, if you like having a color behind the Menu Bar you've got some options. For instance, you can go into System Settings and this is not a new setting but it's been there for a few versions of macOS. You go to Accessibility and then you go to Display and then you've got Reduce Transparency. If you turn that On then you do get a solid color behind the Menu Bar. You can even increase the solidity of it with Increase Contrast, like that. These are settings that were there before and they still work now. But you can also just use your own custom Desktop Background. It actually has a bar behind it. So, for instance, here I've got a graphic I created in Pixelmator Pro. It's got an image but it also has this white box here that I created at the top. When I go into System Settings and then go to Wallpaper I can easily Drag & Drop this image here, just like you could before, and it's going to use my image, which includes the white bar here at the top. So you have options if you truly don't like the new transparent Menu Bar. 

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There was something quickly mentioned during the Keynote but without any details was that you can now set colors for Folders. Now you saw how before you can change the default folder color from blue to something else. But you can also set the color for individual folders. So, for instance, I can select this folder here and I can set its color. The way to do this is kind of interesting. You apply a Tag. The same keyword tags that have been around for a long time. If that tag has a color associated with it then the folder will now take on that color. So I'm going to use Command i to get Info here. Under Tags I'm going to add a tag. Let's add the default red tag here. By adding that tag to that folder you can see it picks up the tag's color. It doesn't have to be one of those default tags. I can go to Show All, for instance, here and I've got a work tag that I created. If I add that then it also picks up that red. If I add multiple ones, like I'll add blue here, then it will use the one that is the last one in the list. So if I were to move blue over to the left there, like that, you see it is going to use the red from work. So you only have the few colors here that are colors for tags, which is kind of limiting. But at least it is quick and easy to do. If you already use tags chances are you probably use them just for files and don't really tag folders. But it doesn't matter because you can keep your tags and then simply add color tags to the end of the list to make the folder a color. 

Now you can also add an icon or character to a folder to make it look different than others. To do that you select it and go to File and down here you've got those same tags just like before. You can easily apply one to give it a color. But underneath you've got Customize Folder. Select that and it brings up this interface here where again you've got the colors here. Which really are just tags. But also you've got all of these different icons that you can apply to a folder. So let's pick one, like for instance these books right here, and you can see how it applies it to the folder. All of these things look pretty nice as they are applied. Kind of as in imprint to the folder. But you can also click here and just add emoji characters. So you can add a character like this and it adds it there. I found that you can search for just about any character you want. Like unicode characters. So you can even do things like look for the circled Latin letters like that and add a character like that to the folder. 

Now Spotlight is completely revamped and there's a lot to see here. I'll probably have to do a whole video just on Spotlight. But here are a couple of interesting things. If you bring up Spotlight by clicking on the magnifying glass in the Menu Bar it appears like this with a small area to type but then the four modes here, the Application's Mode, the Files Mode, the Actions Mode, and the Clipboard Mode, and you can see the keyboard shortcuts right there. So if you do bring it up with Command and then Space it gives you a large search area. But then you can use Command 1, Command 2, Command 3, and Command 4 to bring up the different modes. 

Let's take a look at the Actions Mode to start with and you'll see here that you've got all these different actions. When you select one, like let's select Start Timer,  then you run it and it has you fill these different things in. So I can StartTimer and I can say 5 minutes and then just Return and it will start the timer. You can see there's a whole bunch of different actions that are available. Some added by third party apps and a lot tied into the Shortcuts App. So you're going to see different things here depending upon, like the Shortcuts you've created, for instance. 

Now the next Mode I want to show is the Apps Mode. Here it shows you all of your apps and when you Search you're just seeing applications. It's not searching for files. So it acts a lot like Launchpad. Indeed, it actually replaces Launchpad. That's right! Launchpad isn't in macOS anymore. You see an icon here that looks like Launchpad but it is just called Apps. You can click it and guess what? You go to the Apps section of Spotlight. There is no more launchpad. Even a keyboard shortcut you had before to go to launchpad will just go here. For most people who use launchpad to quickly search and launch an app, really there is no difference. It is the same actions you were doing as before, it is just a different interface. Yes, you can click here if you want and sort by Name instead of by category and do a list instead by icon. 

Let's get one more section of the new Spotlight. But first I want to Copy some things to the Clipboard. Let's copy this to the Clipboard and this to the Clipboard and this to the Clipboard. Now it would be nice to have a Clipboard History and for a long time we've used apps, like this one, to look at our Clipboard history. But you can now do that in Spotlight. So Command Space brings up Spotlight. I can actually move the cursor a little bit like this and it brings up those little categories here. We've got the fourth one, which you can get to with Command 4 as well, called Clipboard. This gives you Clipboard history. You can search it, you can simply arrow down to something you want, and if you select it, it will paste it into the location that you're typing. You can also click here to Copy to the Clipboard if you want. You can also Control Click on something to Copy it, Paste it or delete that item. You have the ability to Clear History. This will work for images as well as for text. 

So we now have Clipboard History on the Mac built-in native to macOS. 

Now there aren't too many new features added to different apps. But one new feature that is certainly going to be handy in Reminders is Auto-Categorization. So say you've created a list like this and you just kind of randomly added things to it. It would be nice to put them in categories. You can create the categories and do it yourself but you can now go to File, and then you've got Auto-Categorize and watch what happens when I do it with this list. It's going to look at all the items and create categories. Furthermore, as I add new items to this list it is automatically going to add them to those categories. 

Now the Password's App has one new feature. But it is a pretty useful one. If you change a password it will remember the change. So, let's go into this example one here. There's the current password and if I look down here you can see there's New History. It remembers that the password was changed. It tells you when it was changed and it will have the history there of the password. This is really important because I know a lot of times you change a password on a website and you've a little unsure whether the change went through. You don't want to forget the old password just in case. So that's kind of done automatically now.

Here is probably the most powerful new feature in macOS Tahoe. That's Shortcuts Automations. So the Shortcuts app allows you to automate things. But you have to trigger the shortcut. On the iPhone though you had these automations where you can have a shortcut run at a specific time or when something happens. Now you can do that on the Mac too which makes them so much more powerful. So in the Shortcuts Apps here you can see your automations and I've add one here. You can add a new one. Here are all the different things you can add automations for. You can have them triggered at a certain time, when an alarm goes off, when you get an email, or a message, when you connect or disconnect from wi-fi, bluetooth, you make a change to display, or activate stage manager, when you open or close an app, there's battery level,  charger being connected, and of course all the Focus modes. When a file is added to a folder or something is modified in a folder or files modified or when you connect an external drive. So there's a lot of different things you can do here. I've got this one automation here set that when a new file is added to the Screenshot Folder it runs this shortcut which goes through the new files there and will rename them. So here's that Screenshots Folder. I'm going to take a screenshot and it's going to get added to there and that Shortcut is going to automatically run and it's going to rename it there using the data structure that I wanted. A lot of people for years have been using Folder Actions created in Automator to do this or to take screenshots or things put into the Downloads Folder and automatically have them moved to other folders as well. You can do that and so much more. This is going to add a lot of power to macOS without the need for third party apps. 

So of course it is early on here with the first beta. There may be changes as to how these work. Maybe new ones added over the summer. We'll just to have to wait and see. But there is definitely a lot more to macOS Tahoe than just a new look. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.